One of the most thrilling games in the Euro 2024 was one of the quarterfinals between France 
and Portugal 
that was tied at 0-0 after the regular + extra time resulting in a penalty shootout. France won 5-3 in pks.
I wanted to create a couple of dynamic charts based on some basic data from that shootout. For example: how many shots were to the left, to the right, to the middle, high, low, or “grass-cutters” in order of shots taken by each team; which ones resulted in goals and which didn’t; who took the shots from each team? In this post, I share my approach and technique to solving this in Excel and then creating animations thereof for a presentation.
The interesting part of this approach is that it is very dynamic, not just a static infograph. Virtually all data are coming from a range of values meaning, it can be reused/updated for any team, for any number of shots, for any positions and outcomes again and again without starting from scratch. It only takes changing the input values once. The animation and customization part requires a little extra effort but overall this approach still saves a ton of time and repetitive efforts.
There were no published data on the directions and characteristics of each kick other than who kicked and if it was a goal or not. But no worries, I found the shootout penalty in Youtube that you can watch below.
By watching the clip, I was able to gather enough data for my data sets including the order of kickers, whether they scored or not, and at which section of the goal they targeted. I don’t need exact metrics on how many inches or milimeters a shot was from the left or the right post, or the crossbar, but a general idea according to the measurement of the goal post…which is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
The Charts
This is how the non-animated, but dynamic charts look like for each team. Each circle offers three to four key pieces of information: i) The kick number (the order) which is shown inside the circle; ii) Whether it was a goal of not by color (green means it was a score, red means it was not); iii) The position of the ball in relation to the post (x, y coordinates). Additionally, I also offer another variation of the charts (also created in Excel) that offers a fourth piece of information: the name of the kicker…this is shown as a label right above each data point. Let’s take a glance at them before we look deeper into the animated versions and the techniques.
Chart with French kicker’s name per shot:
Chart with Portuguese kicker’s name per shot:
France went first and scored all 5 goals. Portugal missed the 3rd kick which meant Portugal’s fate was sealed after France’s 5th kick resulted in a goal, and Portugal did not get to take the 5th shot. That’s the reason why there were only 4 pks from Portugal and 5 pks from France.
Next, I wanted to animate them and so imported them into PowerPoint: one per slide. And using elemental animation features in PowerPoint, I was able to display each goal in order, one by one, with a delay in-between for viewing convenience. Each datapoint is a category, so I animated the chart by category instead of a single object (default). The slides were then exported from PowerPoint into animated GIFs, which we see below.
Animated Charts
This is how France took each PK…
And this is how Portugal took each PK…
Details
As stated before, for this exercise, my basic data gathering started with watching the youtube video of the shootouts and noting them down into a basic table that looks like this (from team France for example): 
The corresponding X, Y values I chose these values based on the observed kicks’ locations (from France): 
For the charts, only a XY scatter plot type is needed. The X and Y values determine the coordinates, and they don’t need to be exact measurements by any means, but relatively sensible. Since a goal post is 24′ wide, my x-axis range of 0 to 24 is sufficient. Similary, the y-axis range of 0 to 8 is sufficient for depicting the height. The background post image in the plots, the marker sizes, and the overall dimension of the chart box all determine how much offsets or tweaks you need to apply to the X and Y values to make them align correctly and look satisfactory. Typically, some fractions of adjustments will be needed to make them look right and without overlaps.
TIP: If there are two or more shots at approximately the same locations at different kicks on the same chart, you will want to offset one slightly from the other or one will completely obscure the other data point.
To apply the labels (to show each kicker’s name) for each data point, I added a column ‘Kicker’ for each team for the corresponding kick# (kick 1…5 for example or as needed). What this means is that when you add Data Labels to the chart, instead of them showing the Y values (which Excel will do by default), you’ll need to select ‘Values from Cells’ option and select the ‘Kicker’ column’s values. Note that charts with dynamic data labels cannot be animated at this time in PowerPoint. All in all, even with the labels options, I used 4 columns: Kick#, Kicker, X, Y. And without the label options, 3 columns: Kick#, X, Y
The background of the charts use a public-domain clipart of a goal post to make it realistic and relatable. The markers are custom images based on unicode symbols and offers circles in numbers 0 through 9. Customizing them to proper size and color was then a simple matter of customizing any font.
The text for France and Portugal charts use the HTML color codes from their respective flags (#0055a4 for France blue; #DA291C for Portugal red).
I hope this was interesting and educational for you. You can check some of the other sports-related analysis posts here, or just explore the site to find many other tips and techniques.
